Staff Software Engineer

Location: Porto - Portugal

Remote Type: Hybrid

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

About Us

Planet is a leading technology company transforming payments by putting customer experience first. We offer integrated solutions that include payment processing, VAT refunds, dynamic currency conversion, and management services for merchants in the Retail and Hospitality sectors worldwide. In recent years, we have experienced significant growth, expanding our services and global presence. With strong private equity investors, Advent International and Eurazeo, we have the financial capital and expertise to grow our capabilities and reach through acquisitions. Our mission is to create a world of connected commerce where payments are simple, secure, and seamless, enabling our partners to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to raise the engineering bar across the domain that clears, settles, funds and reports on the transactions Planet processes. It decides what every merchant, partner and scheme is owed, and it is business-critical every hour of every day.

This is a hands-on, cross-team role reporting to the Director of Software Engineering. Working alongside the teams, you will play a key role in the operational side of the domain's technology (stability, engineering standards and day-to-day technical health), and collaborate closely with our Principal Engineers in shaping its technical strategy. Expect around half your time to be hands-on, flexing with the rhythm of the year.

What You Will Do

• Lead the move to agentic development. Help every team reach fully agentic workflows, from specification through to operations, and lead by example in your own work. Establish the domain's framework for agentic engineering: a well-curated, shared set of agents, skills and instructions that everyone knows how to find, use, improve and evaluate, in line with Planet's company-wide AI direction.
• Strengthen the most impactful work. Work side by side with the teams doing it: shaping the approach together, pairing on the hardest problems, and building the shared understanding that lets the team carry it forward with confidence.
• Shape the platform's evolution. Map how a large, multi-layered system really behaves and where it is fragile, and evolve it in safe, incremental steps rather than rewrites, making it easier for both people and agents to work in.
• Keep the platform stable. Be there when it matters during incidents, help teams grow their ownership of production, and drive a continuous improvement loop that turns what we learn into lasting resilience.
• Raise the engineering standard. Champion state-of-the-art practices across testing, review, delivery and observability, and coach engineers across teams as they grow with them.
• Bridge operations and strategy. Work with product and engineering leadership to identify high-value problems and propose initiatives, grounded in a first-hand view of production. Make trade-offs clear, so the cost, operational risk and business impact of technical choices drive what we invest in.

Who You Are

• An engineer whose impact reaches beyond a single team. You have led cross-team initiatives, raised standards and shaped decisions through influence, with no direct reports. We care about the impact you have had, not the years it took.
• Grounded in strong software engineering fundamentals, with real experience running systems in production. You have mastery of object-oriented programming, design patterns, relational databases and event-driven architectures. Java is a plus, but fundamentals matter more than any language.
• AI-native to the core. Agents do the building; you make it excellent. You write the specs, engineer the context, steer the work and own what ships. You have already taken a team on that journey, and you are excited to take a whole domain further.
• Calm under pressure, with solid experience in incidents, observability and designing for failure.
• At ease with complexity and mature systems. You can work out how a layered platform really fits together, and you respect what it does well while you improve it.
• Collaborative by nature. You make the people around you better, and you communicate clearly in writing and in person, in English, across distributed teams.

Why Planet

Planet is an equal opportunity employer where diversity is valued, and all employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need. Come and grow your career in the most exciting, fast paced technology market, with a business that delivers feel-good connected commerce. We would love to hear from you – Apply now.

At Planet, we embrace a hybrid work model, with three days a week in the office.
 

Reasonable accommodations may be made in order to allow for an individual to perform the essential functions of this role successfully.